Office 2016: Features and Specifications

Microsoft Office is already the industry standard Office suite, but that doesn’t mean the guys at Microsoft are just sitting around doing nothing to maintain their position. In fact, they’re currently working on a new version of the suite, named Office 2016, which is predicted to hit the market in the second half of 2015. A preview version of the upcoming suite is already available for download on the Microsoft website, and it’s enough to give us a good idea of what to expect from Office 2016.

Image credit: flickr.com

New Looks

The first and most noticeable change in Microsoft Office 2016 is its interface – the Office suite clearly reflects she shift towards the mobile segment, with most of the menus, buttons and functions being optimized to be used on touch-enabled devices, as well as to adapt to smaller screens. Another design-related change was the addition of some new color themes, and the modifications brought to the overall design, which is now flatter and better integrated with the design of Microsoft’s upcoming operating system, Windows 10.

Under the Hood

While the design of a software program is important, it’s its functionality that matters the most. Be that as it may, let’s bear in mind that it’s Microsoft Office we’re talking about here – an office suite that has pretty much all the features you could possibly ask for, whether you’re a new, intermediate, or advanced user. Taking into account the fact that there wasn’t much innovation that could be brought to the scene, Microsoft focused on improving existing features and security, which is always a welcomed addition.

Because Office 2016 was designed with the mobile segment and the cloud in mind, Microsoft took some big steps into ensuring that usage experience doesn’t get affected by outside factors, and a great example for this is the introduction of placeholders for complex charts or SmartArt elements, which can take longer to load if you’re opening a document from a cloud platform. Instead of having to wait for the whole document to load before you can open it, like you had to do in older versions of Office, Office 2016 will simply replace those elements with some placeholders of the same dimensions, thus allowing you to work on the rest of the contents without having to wait for slow networks.

Image credit: flickr.com

In the era of emails, Outlook gets some great upgrades, such as a more intuitive interface regarding attachments. In Office 2016, when you click on the “Add Attachment” button, you will be prompted with a list of recently modified files, making it more intuitive to send someone a document you’ve just created or edited. However, when it comes to sharing and collaborating, Office 2016 still falls short on a completely seamless integration with OneDrive. In the Office for Mac 2016, you can browse through the shared documents directly from within an Office app, but the PC version of Office 2016 doesn’t display these files unless you already opened them at least once. This is only annoying when you’re starting a new project, and have to open the files for the first time, as you will have to do it manually from within the link you get in your email. We won’t be quick to judge, though, as there are chances that this issue will be fixed by the time Office 2016 will be released.

Data Loss Prevention, a feature that has been extremely helpful in preventing the accidental sharing of confidential information via emails will come to Word, PowerPoint and Excel too, thus increasing the overall security and preventing accidental data leaks.

Conclusion

As you can see, Office 2016 does not intend to revolutionize your office universe, but rather consolidate and secure it more. The goal is to make the usage experience more consistent across platforms, and to make the apps better, safer and more productive, and from what the Preview version showed us so far, that’s exactly what Microsoft managed to achieve. Sure, there are some imperfections here and there, but since the final version is not out yet, chances are these small inconveniences will be history by the time Office 2016 hits the market.

Overall, whether you’re an occasional user of the Microsoft Office suite or a hardcore veteran, Office 2016 is sure to cater to your needs.

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